Luckily for Saul Eady, the police’s own recordings of a stakeout contradicted the testimony of detective David Friedrich. Accused of attempted murder, the other man arrested with him had already been convicted and received a life sentence…the only real evidence was the detective’s sworn testimony that he had seen Eady at the scene, driving the van involved in the incident. The tapes proved that at the time Friedrich never identified Eady, and that key things that Friedrich testified to under oath hadn’t in fact happened quite the way he said they did. In fact, nothing at all like the way he said they did.

So Eady is a free man, and what will happen to Friedrich? The District Attorney thinks he was just mistaken…such things happen after all. So what is the dfference between simply making a few mistakes, and outright lying? This sounds like lying to me. Which is perjury, and should be prosecuted. Even were it a simple mistake, it would have ended with an innocent man spending his life in prison as far too many other cases do. Eady had a good lawyer willing to put the extra time into getting additional evidence, and then to sift through 3 hours of confused police recordings and present them back to a judge. Very few defendants in our system have such a thing as a motivated lawyer, most in Eady’s position would have gone to jail for life. So what are the consequences for Friedrich and a broken justice system?